About Me
I'm a post-doctoral student at Stanford University, working with Diyi Yang, Sanmi Koyejo and Daniel Ho. My research lies in the intersection of natural language processing, planning and creativity. I model how humans execute creative and open-ended tasks (e.g. writing news stories) to build AI systems that align better with our goals. Check out my research!
I got my PhD from the University of Southern California, co-advised by Jonathan May, Nanyun Peng, and Emilio Ferrara. Before that, I was a data scientist and journalist at the New York Times where I worked with Dr. Chris Wiggins.
Before that, I studied double bass at the Juilliard School of Music and worked as a professional musician in off-Broadway productions including The Dybbuk and Spears: The Gospel According to Brittney. In my PhD, I organized charity concerts, including raising money for humanitarian aid for Ukraine.
Announcements:
- Are you interested in working on creative tasks, reward learning, or agentic planning? I will be starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota and I am looking for PhD students to join my lab. Please reach out if you are interested.
News:
- Oct 23, 2025 🎶 I gave a talk at the Stanford NLP Lunch. The topic was Music + Linguistics, and summarized our ongoing work on music modeling with EleutherAI. Slides.
- Oct 10, 2025 🎙️ I delivered a keynote at the NLP4Democracy workshop at COLM 2025. Event link.
- Sept 15, 2025 🎉 I began my post-doc, jointly funded by Stanford SAIL and HAI and advised by Diyi Yang, Sanmi Koyejo, and Daniel Ho. Announcement.
- Aug 8, 2025 🎓 I defended my thesis!!
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May 3, 2025
🧑🏫 We gave a tutorial at NAACL 2025. Event link.
Creative Planning with Language Models: Practice, Evaluation and Applications with Tenghao Huang, Philippe Laban, and Nanyun Peng
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Nov 14, 2024
🎉🎉 I am so honored to have won two (2) Outstanding Paper Awards at EMNLP 2024.
Do LLM's Plan Like Human Writers? Comparing Journalistic Coverage of Press Releases with LLMs with Mark Dredze, Sebastian Gehrmann, and Nanyun PengAre Large Language Models Capable of Generating Human-Level Narratives? with Yufei Tian, Tenghao Huang, Miri Liu, Derek Jiang, Muhao Chen, Jonathan May, Nanyun Peng
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July 23, 2024
🎉 I am so honored to have won a Spotlight Award at ICML 2024.
Stay on Topic with Classifier-Free Guidance with Guillaume Sanchez, Honglu Fan, Elad Levi and Stella Biderman
- Feb 22, 2024 🗣️ I spoke at the Stanford NLP Seminar. The title of my talk is NLP Approaches in Computational Journalism: Newsfinding, Sourcing and Updating Stories.
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July 13, 2022
🎉 I am so honored to have won an Outstanding Paper Award at NAACL 2022.
NewsEdits: A News Article Revision Dataset and a Document-Level Reasoning Challenge with Xiang Reg, Nanyun Peng, and Jonathan May
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March 15, 2022
🎶 We are humbled for the support for our Ukraine Benefit Concert. State Senator Scott Weiner and the Ukrainian ambassador gave inspiring speeches, and we raised $60,000.
- April 4, 2020 🎉 I am over the moon to have been awarded a 3 year Bloomberg PhD Fellowship. This will allow me to formulate a multi-year research plan and focus on research in my PhD that I care about.
- Sept 1, 2019 👨🎓 I'm excited to start my PhD at USC!
Contact Information:
The best place to reach me is: alexspan@stanford.edu.
Other emails I check are: spangher@usc.edu and alexander.spangher@gmail.com.
